Frequent hospital admissions in Singapore: clinical risk factors and impact of socioeconomic status
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Singapore Med J 2018; 59(1): 39-43
Original Article
https://doi.org/10.11622/smedj.2016110
Frequent hospital admissions in Singapore: clinical risk
factors and impact of socioeconomic status
Lian Leng Low1,2, MMed, FCFP, Wei Yi Tay1,2, MMed, FCFP, Matthew Joo Ming Ng1,2, MMed, FCFP, Shu Yun Tan1,2, MMed, FCFP,
Nan Liu3,4, PhD, Kheng Hock Lee1,2, MMed, FCFP
INTRODUCTION Frequent admitters to hospitals are high-cost patients who strain finite healthcare resources. However, the
exact risk factors for frequent admissions, which can be used to guide risk stratification and design effective interventions
locally, remain unknown. Our study aimed to identify the clinical and sociodemographic risk factors associated with
frequent hospital admissions in Singapore.
METHODS An observational study was conducted using retrospective 2014 data from the administrative database at
Singapore General Hospital, Singapore. Variables were identified a priori and included patient demographics, comorbidities,
prior healthcare utilisation, and clinical and laboratory variables during the index admission. Multivariate logistic regression
analysis was used to identify independent risk factors for frequent admissions.
RESULTS A total of 16,306 unique patients were analysed and 1,640 (10.1%) patients were classified as frequent admitters.
On multivariate logistic regression, 16 variables were independently associated with frequent hospital admissions, including
age, cerebrovascular disease, history of malignancy, haemoglobin, serum creatinine, serum albumin, and number of
specialist outpatient clinic visits, emergency department visits, admissions preceding index admission and medications
dispensed at discharge. Patients staying in public rental housing had a 30% higher risk of being a frequent admitter after
adjusting for demographics and clinical conditions.
CONCLUSION Our study, the first in our knowledge to examine the clinical risk factors for frequent admissions in Singapore,
validated the use of public rental housing as a sensitive indicator of area-level socioeconomic status in Singapore. These
risk factors can be used to identify high-risk patients in the hospital so that they can receive interventions that reduce
readmission risk.
Keywords: frequent admissions, readmission, socioeconomic
INTRODUCTION from SGD 4 billion in 2011 to SGD 12 billion in 2020.(10) The
The rising demand for hospital resources from an ageing main cost driver of healthcare in Singapore and globally is
population and increasing chronic disease burden is putting a inpatient cost.(11) In 2010, the 30-day all-cause readmission
strain on the healthcare system and exerting pressure on finite rate in Singapore was 11.6%, rising to 19.0% among patients
healthcare resources. Patients who are frequently admitted aged 65 years and older.(12) This rate is only slightly lower than
to hospital contribute to bed shortage and also experience the 30-day readmission rate in the United States, which was
significant psychological stress and financial burden.(1) The 19.6%.(13) The Ministry of Health (MOH), Singapore, sees the
numerous reasons for frequent admissions include poor health, rapidly ageing population and escalating healthcare costs as
unresolved medical issues at discharge, poor health literacy major concerns. Taking a population-based approach to health,
and socioeconomic deprivation.(1) Evidence suggests that low the MOH created six regional health systems (RHSs) in 2011, each
socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with readmission in responsible for care integration in a specific geographic region.
Western health systems,(2-5) and readmission risk prediction Each RHS is anchored by a tertiary hospital, which is supported by
models that included socioeconomic indicators have performed a community hospital providing intermediate and rehabilitation
better than models without these indicators.(6,7) However, this care, with links to primary care and long-term care services in
relationship is less clear in Asian populations due to differences in the region. The RHS under SingHealth is the largest healthcare
economic strength and the limited availability of universal social cluster in Singapore and provides care for the south-central part
health insurance.(8) Direct out-of-pocket payments may cause the of the country. Our hospital, Singapore General Hospital (SGH),
poor to forgo unaffordable hospital treatment.(8) Singapore, is the flagship hospital of the SingHealth RHS and the
Singapore is an affluent Asian economy with a gross domestic largest tertiary hospital in Singapore, with 37 clinical specialities
product of approximately SGD 73,000 and a multiethnic and 88,000 inpatient admissions each year.(14) SGH is supported
population of 5.6 million people.(9) It has one of the most by a community hospital, Bright Vision Hospital, which provides
rapidly ageing populations in Asia, with an increasing chronic intermediate care to patients requiring inpatient rehabilitation to
disease burden. Healthcare expenditure is expected to triple improve in their activities of daily living. Primary care is provided
1
Department of Family Medicine and Continuing Care, Singapore General Hospital, 2Family Medicine Clerkship, Duke-NUS Medical School, 3Department of Emergency Medicine,
Singapore General Hospital, 4Centre for Quantitative Medicine, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore
Correspondence: Dr Low Lian Leng, Associate Consultant, Department of Family Medicine and Continuing Care, Singapore General Hospital, Academia Level 4, 20 College
Road, Singapore 169856. low.lian.leng@sgh.com.sg
39Original Article
by the nine public-funded polyclinics under the SingHealth cluster of sample size.(19) Therefore, taking into consideration the 30-day
and privately run general practitioners. Community services all-cause readmission rate of 11.6%(12) and the 37 variables that
include day rehabilitation centres, nursing homes, and home were evaluated for significance, a minimum sample size of 3,200
medical and nursing services. was required for our study.
Frequent admitters in Singapore (defined by the MOH as Patient-related data (e.g. demographics, clinical and
patients with three or more inpatient admissions in a year) are laboratory data, health services utilisation and mortality) was
high-cost patients with an average cost of nearly SGD 30,000 per extracted in a de-identified format from the hospital’s enterprise
patient.(15) Frequent admitters have been found to be older and analytics platform. eHINTS (Electronic Health Intelligence
have the comorbidities of heart failure and stroke.(15) The impact System) is the single enterprise data repository and analytical
of socioeconomic factors and clinical factors such as high-risk platform for SingHealth that serves the analysis and reporting
medications and laboratory values remains unknown, although needs of business, finance and clinical users. It integrates clinical,
this information would be beneficial in guiding risk stratification operational and financial data from multiple systems and across
and designing effective interventions to improve care delivery institutions to provide users with comprehensive information for
for these patients. business decisions. Its analytical tools, ‘self-service’ drill-down
The advent of electronic health records allows rich capabilities and location analytics enable faster and more efficient
clinical data to be retrieved from electronic data repositories, reporting and analysis. Data from the Electronic Health Record
although individual-level indicators of SES, including individual (EHR) system is integrated to support clinical analytics.
employment status and monthly household income, are rarely Patient demographics extracted included age, gender, marital
recorded or available in health records. To examine the association status, ethnicity and admission ward class. Variables in our study
between SES and frequent admissions in Singapore, a potential were chosen a priori and have been shown to affect admission
solution could be to use public rental housing as an area-level risk, based on the medical literature. As these variables were
measure of low SES. In Singapore, home ownership is a key local extracted from the hospital’s EHR and are available to all hospitals
indicator of SES.(16) In 2014, 5.3% of resident households resided in Singapore that use the system, our study findings are potentially
in public rental housing,(17) which the Housing and Development generalisable. Our study was novel in that it examined residence
Board (HDB) heavily subsidises for the needy. Households that are in public rental housing (HDB one- and two-room rental flats) as
eligible for the highly subsidised rates have a low total household an area-level indicator of SES in Singapore. In our dataset, public
gross income of SGD 2,313 per month, compared to the national rental housing was recoded based on postal codes published
median household income of SGD 8,290 per month.(18) on the HDB website.(20) Each housing block in Singapore has a
Despite the increasing importance of sociodemographic unique postal code.
factors for healthcare utilisation, to the best of our knowledge, Clinical data extracted included major diseases listed
no study in Singapore has evaluated the impact of low SES on under the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) and the number
frequent admission risk. The primary objective of this study was to of medications dispensed at discharge. Major diseases were
identify the clinical and sociodemographic risk factors associated identified using International Classification of Diseases,
with frequent hospital admissions in Singapore. 10th edition (ICD-10), codes in any primary or secondary
diagnosis fields dating back to one year preceding the index
METHODS admission. The CCI was computed for each patient using the
This was an observational study using retrospective 2014 data Charlson R package. To examine the effect of high-risk clinical
obtained from the administrative database of SGH. It was conditions, the diagnoses of congestive heart failure (CHF),
approved by the SingHealth Centralised Institutional Review cerebrovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Board (CIRB Ref: 2015/2076) with a waiver of patient consent. (COPD) and malignancies were derived using ICD-10 codes in
To be eligible for inclusion in our study, patients must have our dataset. Patients with a history of depression were identified
had at least one admission to SGH in 2014. Patients who died in through prescriptions of antidepressants they had received,
2014, non-residents or patients who had a discharge destination such as lorazepam, mirtazapine, fluvoxamine, escitalopram and
other than home at index discharge were excluded from analysis. fluoxetine. History of using high-risk medications, such as anti-
Patients without any hospital admission were also excluded, psychotics and warfarin, was also extracted. These were retrieved
as information regarding their socioeconomic indicators, and from data on discharge medications in the EHR. Laboratory values
clinical and laboratory data were incomplete in the administrative of haemoglobin, white blood cell count, and serum creatinine and
database. We excluded patients who lived in areas where SGH albumin were extracted based on the first values recorded at the
was not the primary hospital, as these patients were likely to index admission and used to indicate a patient’s general health
be cared for by another RHS. Similarly, patients discharged to condition. Information on prior healthcare utilisation (e.g. number
long-term residential care facilities were excluded, as they could of admissions, and visits to the emergency department and
be located in geographical areas that were not served by the specialist outpatient clinics) in the preceding one year was also
SingHealth RHS and therefore could confound the frequency retrieved. The outcome measure was frequent admissions in 2014.
of subsequent hospital admissions. Ten events per variable was Data on health services utilisation, demographics, clinical
considered as the minimum number required for the calculation variables and laboratory variables between frequent admitters
40Original Article
Table I. Patient characteristics and factors associated with frequent hospital admission.
Variable No. (%)/mean ± standard deviation p‑value*
Total Non‑frequent admitters Frequent admitters
(n = 16,306) (n = 14,666) (n = 1,640)
Age (yr) 59.71 ± 20.30 58.94 ± 20.57 66.53 ± 16.21 < 0.0001
Male gender 7,814 (47.9) 6,955 (47.4) 859 (52.4) 0.0001
Length of hospital stay (day) 4.64 ± 8.31 4.48 ± 8.27 6.08 ± 8.56 0.0001
Urgent admission 11,245 (69.0) 10,001 (68.2) 1,244 (75.9) < 0.0001
Public rental housing 2,466 (15.1) 2,120 (14.5) 346 (21.1) < 0.0001
Charlson Comorbidity Index 0.15 ± 0.60 0.11 ± 0.49 0.55 ± 1.10 < 0.0001
LACE score 5.59 ± 2.77 5.37 ± 2.63 7.56 ± 3.20 < 0.0001
ED visits in 6 mth preceding index admission 0.64 ± 1.60 0.50 ± 1.09 1.92 ± 3.62 < 0.0001
Admissions in 1 yr preceding index admission 1.09 ± 2.46 0.85 ± 1.88 3.28 ± 4.82 < 0.0001
SOC visits in 1 yr preceding index admission 4.96 ± 8.47 4.43 ± 7.23 9.63 ± 14.87 < 0.0001
Surgical procedures during admission 0.47 ± 0.79 0.46 ± 0.77 0.47 ± 0.98 0.7610
Medications dispensed at discharge 10.05 ± 7.47 9.62 ± 7.22 13.90 ± 8.48 < 0.0001
Admission ward class B2/C 12,792 (78.4) 11,349 (77.4) 1,443 (88.0) < 0.0001
Congestive cardiac failure 309 (1.9) 241 (1.6) 68 (4.1) < 0.0001
Cerebrovascular disease 83 (0.5) 64 (0.4) 19 (1.2) 0.0001
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 196 (1.2) 165 (1.1) 31 (1.9) 0.0010
History of malignancy 32 (0.2) 16 (0.1) 16 (1.0) < 0.0001
History of depression 486 (3.0) 388 (2.6) 98 (6.0) < 0.0001
*p < 0.05 is considered statistically significant. ED: emergency department; SOC: specialist outpatient clinic
and non-frequent admitters was compared. Pearson’s chi-square admissions: male gender; emergent admission; residence in
test and Fisher’s exact test were used for categorical variables, public rental housing; admission to subsidised ward classes;
and independent sample t-test was used for continuous variables. cerebrovascular disease; history of malignancy; haemoglobin
Univariate logistic regression analysis was used to investigate the level; serum creatinine level; serum albumin level; age; length of
association of demographic characteristics, disease conditions hospital stay; LACE score; number of specialist outpatient clinic
(e.g. CHF, cerebrovascular disease, COPD, presence of visits in the preceding one year; number of admissions in the
malignancies and history of depression) and clinical measures preceding one year; number of emergency department visits in
with hospital admission rate among frequent admitters and non- the preceding six months; and number of medications dispensed
frequent admitters. Factors that were significant in the univariate at discharge (Table II).
model were incorporated into the multivariate logistic regression The odds ratio of frequent admitters associated with residence
model. All tests of significance used the 95% level (p < 0.05). All in public rental housing was 1.30 (p < 0.001) after adjusting for
analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 21.0 demographics and clinical conditions; in other words, patients
for Windows (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA). staying in public rental housing had a 30% higher risk of being
a frequent admitter.
RESULTS
A total of 16,306 unique patients fulfilled the inclusion criteria and DISCUSSION
were analysed. Of these, 1,640 (10.1%) patients were classified This study aimed to identify clinical and sociodemographic
as frequent admitters. Patient characteristics are shown in Table I. risk factors associated with frequent hospital admissions in
The mean age of all analysed patients was 59.71 ± 20.30 years. Singapore. Interestingly, we found that patients residing in public
The majority of patients were female (52.1%, n = 8,492) and most rental housing have a higher risk of frequent admission after
of the admissions were emergent (69.0%, n = 11,245). The mean demographics and clinical conditions were adjusted for, which
length of hospital stay was 4.64 ± 8.31 days. On average, patients highlights the importance of social determinants of health.
had a mean LACE score of 5.59 ± 2.77. Compared to non-frequent Possible reasons for poorer outcomes in patients with lower
admitters, frequent admitters were older, had significantly longer SES include poorer health literacy, the inability of healthcare
length of hospital stay during the index admission, higher CCI, providers to align their care to the constraints that low SES
higher LACE score, greater healthcare utilisation (number of patients face after discharge, and socioeconomic constraints on
specialist outpatient clinic visits and admissions) in the preceding patients’ ability to perform recommended behaviours.(19) Locally,
one year and more emergency department visits in the preceding Wee et al found that lower-income Singaporeans staying in
six months. public rental housing do not view Western-trained physicians
On multivariate logistic regression analysis, 16 variables as their first choice when seeking primary care,(21) citing cost
were found to be independently associated with frequent hospital as a major barrier. The possibility that this delay in seeking
41Original Article
Table II. Significant variables independently associated with frequent hospital admissions on multivariate logistic regression analysis.
Variable β Adjusted odds ratio (95% CI) p‑value*
Male gender 0.17 1.19 (1.04–1.35) 0.0030
Urgent admission 0.47 1.61 (1.34–1.93) < 0.0001
Public rental housing 0.26 1.30 (1.13–1.50) < 0.0001
Admission ward class†
B1 0.14 1.15 (0.82–1.63) 0.4170
B2+ 0.64 1.90 (1.29–2.78) 0.0010
B2/C 0.61 1.83 (1.38–2.43) < 0.0001
Cerebrovascular disease 0.84 2.32 (1.29–4.18) 0.0050
History of malignancy 2.10 8.18 (3.90–17.16) < 0.0001
Haemoglobin 0.17 1.19 (1.04–1.35) 0.0100
Serum creatinine 0.81 2.24 (1.73–2.91) < 0.0001
Serum albumin 0.54 1.72 (1.25–2.36) 0.0010
Age 0.01 1.01 (1.01–1.02) < 0.0001
Length of hospital stay 0.02 1.02 (1.01–1.03) < 0.0001
LACE score 0.17 1.19 (1.15–1.23) < 0.0001
Admissions in 1 yr preceding index admission 0.08 1.08 (1.05–1.11) < 0.0001
SOC visits in 1 yr preceding index admission 0.02 1.02 (1.02–1.03) < 0.0001
ED visits in 6 mth preceding index admission 0.14 1.15 (1.09–1.21) < 0.0001
Medications dispensed at discharge 0.02 1.02 (1.01–1.03) < 0.0001
*p < 0.05 is considered statistically significant. †Reference class: A1 ward class. β: beta coefficient; CI: confidence interval; ED: emergency department;
SOC: specialist outpatient clinic
appropriate primary care resulted in late disease presentation (CMS) to reduce payments to hospitals for excess readmissions
and inappropriate hospital utilisation warrants further study. related to heart failure.(26) In October 2014, the CMS expanded the
Therefore, the responsibility is on the health systems (i.e. RHSs in HRRP to include COPD.(27) The CCI is a measure of comorbidity
the Singapore context) to address socioeconomic determinants of burden and has prognostic value for 30-day readmission risk.(28)
health in population health management. Area-level measures of A possible explanation for the absence of a significant association
SES, such as public rental housing, can be easily retrieved from in our study is that these three factors were confounded by other
hospital electronic medical records and integrated into a real-time variables in our group, such as prior admissions and emergency
prediction model to help clinicians identify patients who are at department visits in the preceding one year.
high risk of frequent admissions. In contrast, while individual- While most studies on readmission risk predictive models
level measures of SES (e.g. individual employment status, being a have focused on 30-day readmission, risk of readmission or
recipient of financial aid and monthly household income) may be death as an outcome measure, very few studies have examined
more sensitive indicators, this information needs to be collected the risk factors for frequent admission risk. However, the median
prospectively, limiting its practical utility in the busy hospital proportion of avoidable 30-day readmissions was found to be only
ward setting. The association of public rental housing with various 27% in a study by Van Walraven et al,(29) raising doubts over the
healthcare utilisation outcomes, such as 30-day readmissions, concentration of research on 30-day readmissions. Given that
emergency department attendances or outpatient specialist clinic frequent admitters are high-cost patients, more attention should be
visits, could be the subject of future studies. paid to frequent admissions, as early identification and a proactive
Not surprisingly, debilitating diseases such as cerebrovascular preventive approach may result in improved patient outcome.
disease and malignancy significantly increase the risk of frequent To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to examine
admission.(22) Laboratory test values, such as haemoglobin, serum the clinical and sociodemographic risk factors for frequent
creatinine and serum albumin levels, have been associated with inpatient admissions in Singapore. Our findings may contribute
avoidable readmissions(23) and 30-day readmission risk.(6,24) Serum to creating a future predictive model to identify patients who
creatinine is a clinical marker for renal failure, while haemoglobin are at risk of being a frequent admitter, so that they can receive
and serum albumin levels indicate patients’ general health and appropriate interventions. This study is also novel in that it
frailty.(25) Laboratory values are likely surrogate markers for validated the use of public rental housing as a sensitive indicator
medical conditions that predispose a patient to frequent admission of area-level SES in Singapore.
risk. A surprising finding was the lack of a significant association Our study was not without limitations. Firstly, our dataset
between CHF, COPD or CCI and frequent admission risk in our did not include patients who used only outpatient or emergency
study cohort. COPD has been linked to readmissions in the United department services in our health system but had no hospital
States; in 2012, the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program admissions. However, these patients are at low risk and our
(HRRP) required the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services study aimed to identify risk factors of high-utilising and high-cost
42Original Article
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